Boygenius bring Re:SETtoa resounding close
As the inaugural weekend for the Stage at Suffolk Downs wound to a close with the final day of the Re:SET concert series on Sunday, it was clear that Boston’s latest outdoor venue wasn’t without substantial liabilities. Saturday’s downpour not only canceled that day’s program, poor drainage meant that large sections of the grounds were still sodden and pooling water one day later. And the proximity to Logan Airport meant that the performances were periodically interrupted by the roar of airplanes flying not too far overhead.
But the music onstage wasn’t among the problems. A well-curated selection of indie artists capped by the heart-bursting boygenius gave the first Re:SET a fine send-off.
Bartees Strange opened with a light but intense churn that gave some anthemic power to material like “Heavy Heart,” but at times it seemed like the sounds he and his band were making stubbornly resisted coalescing into songs.
With his band arrayed side by side at folding tables like they were a conference panel (and the video screen exclusively showing an overhead angle like they were on a cooking show), the constant up- and downshifting of Dijon offered a push and pull between gentle pleading and knob-twisting noise that amounted to avant-garde soul. The singer may or may not have been losing his voice, but if so, it was exactly in the sweet spot where it was vulnerably frayed, rather than unlistenably wrecked.
With a pleading, occasionally forlorn voice with soft-focus edges, Clairo’s songs were sadness-coded, even when they weren’t explicitly sad. Commanding the stage with a casual glee behind sunglasses that never came off and a hood that only occasionally did, the Carlisle native swung between crisply ornate ‘70s adult-contemporary pop, buzzy and bouncy indie-rock, and fingerpicked acoustic laments that sounded like heartbreak.
Boygenius came out with a onetwo-three punch, with Thin Lizzy’s charging “The Boys Are Back in Town” heralding their arrival, performing the lovely a cappella “Without You Without Them” entirely backstage but shown on the screen, and then taking the stage proper with the driving and electric “$20.” The group comprising three indie darlings — Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker — were unquestionably equals, handing off vocals and folding their voices around one another, finding strength in sad songs like the heart-tugging “Emily I’m Sorry” through their harmonies.
With only one album and one EP to their name, boygenius performed literally every song in their repertoire plus the unreleased “Boyfriend,” all downstroke momentum and energy. Even the songs from the members’ solo acts — Dacus’s “Please Stay,” Baker’s “Favor,” and Bridgers’s “Graceland Too” — had been recorded with the others on vocals. And they never flagged, rounding the end with “Anti-Curse” riding a four-guitar lift, the gorgeous “Ketchum, ID” creating the effect of an unamplified performance, and the slow, huge closer “Salt in the Wound” capturing Dacus and Bridgers harmonizing while Baker whipped out guitar leads. And as soon as they finished, boygenius collapsed in a literal pile, sisterhood and affection made manifest.